Hopelessly devoted to animals
Australia’s endangered creatures have no more fervent friend than LA-based Olivia Newton-John, who regularly returns home to try to save animals under threat. Right now, she is furious at the cruel poisoning by sections of Tasmania’s logging industry of precious fauna, some of which are protected species. Here, Olivia airs her conservation concerns.
Two years ago, I was lucky enough to be taken by Planet Ark to south-west Tasmania, to experience the ancient trees of the Styx Valley. What I saw was a truly beautiful old-growth forest.
Many of the trees were hundreds of years old and stood up to 90m tall. Home to many species of wildlife, the forest contained trees that were already well established when Captain Cook arrived in Australia.
It saddens me that my daughter, Chloe [now 18]. will never see the giant trees that I encountered in the Styx. Your children will never see them, either. The area I visited has since been logged and burnt. The animals that lived there are gone deliberately poisoned to stop them from eating the plantation seedlings that had replaced their once rich and bio-diverse forest.
The deliberate poisoning of these native animals angers me terribly, because it’s so cruel. When they eat carrots laced with 1080 poison, they can take up to three days to perish. During that time, they writhe and convulse, have fits and heart attacks, and eventually go into a coma and die a truly horrible death.
I am not opposed to plantations and creating forest jobs. We need the wood and we need the plantations. And Tasmania really needs the jobs.
But my message to Tasmanian logging companies is that although we want plantations, we want those that don’t involve the deliberate poisoning of defenceless wildlife and the logging of irreplaceable old-growth forest. We forget too easily that we only borrow the environment from our children. Once these old forests are gone, we lose them forever. We will never have the chance to show them to our children and grandchildren.
The negative overseas media coverage of this issue also puts Australia’s tourism industry at risk. How will potential overseas visitors view our country. when they see us poisoning Tasmanian wallabies, possums, wombats and other protected species? This is definitely not the image of an environmentally conscious country.
This has to be stopped-now. We have to end this problem in a way that works best for the environment as well as for Tasmania’s timber companies and timber communities. The hard-working Tasmanian forest workers deserve nothing less: their welfare can’t be ignored.
We were able to help whalers to stop killing whales. We must also help the Tasmanian logging communities to end old-growth logging and the poisoning of our native wildlife.